Two’s A Crowd

A new novel from a Portuguese veteran.

The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, born in 1922, has not let the Nobel Prize, which he received in 1998, slow him down. He was a late starter in the lists of fiction, having been a civil servant and sometime journalist to the age of fifty. He found his groove in the baroque magic-realist historical novel “Baltasar and Blimunda” (1982 in Portugal, when he turned sixty; 1987 in the U.S.), and combines, in the novels of his productive eighth decade—“Blindness” (1995, 1997), “All the Names” (1997, 1999), and “The Cave” (2000, 2002)—fantastic premises with a relaxed, disarmingly direct style and a quizzical, respectful interest in everyday life. His prose is open to philosophical and psychological speculation as well as to homely folk wisdom, and its flights into the impossible are balanced by a feeling for the daily routines and labors that compose, for most of humanity, the substance of existence. Saramago is, in the not uncommon fashion of Latin intellectuals, an avowed Communist; his sympathy for workers broadens and solidifies his fictional thought-experiments.

His new novel, “The Double” (published in Portuguese in 2002; translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Harcourt; $25), deals with white-collar workers: the thirty-eight-year-old hero, the impressively named Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, teaches history in a secondary school; the divorced Tertuliano’s present lady friend, Maria da Paz, works in a bank; Tertuliano’s double, António Claro, acts in minor movie roles under the name of Daniel Santa-Clara; his wife, Helena, works in a travel agency. Their interactions and confusions, as intricate as those of a French bedroom farce, are scrupulously placed within the confines of working days and seasonal vacations, just as the waking nightmare, for Tertuliano and António, of confronting an exact physical duplicate is set in a sufficiently persuasive (though unnamed) metropolis of five million people, with their automobiles, their apartments, their anonymity. The wildly ramifying plot has an improvised air but proves to be tightly knit, constructed toward a stark dénouement. The tight construction floats, however, on a bubbling, uninhibited authorial voice of cheerful volatility, brimming with asides and self-corrections, such as “Well, that’s not quite true” and “There are moments in a narrative, and this, as you will see, has been one of them, when any parallel manifestation of ideas and feelings on the part of the narrator with respect to what the characters themselves might be feeling or thinking at that point should be expressly forbidden by the laws of good writing.”

Saramago has the gift of gab. Our impression is of a writer, like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any improbability to life by hurling words at it. Gabbiness is hard to illustrate in a concise review, but here is a relatively short example, working up to virtual impenetrability:

Real life has always seemed to us more frugal in coincidences than the novel or other forms of fiction, unless we were to allow that the principle of coincidence is the one true ruler of the world, in which case, we should give as much value to the coincidence one actually experiences as to that which is written about, and vice versa.

And here is another, working up to a joke of sorts:

If, as children used to be told, in order to illustrate the relationship between small causes and great effects, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost, the trajectory followed by the deductions and inductions that brought Tertuliano Máximo Afonso to the conclusion set out above seems to us no less dubious and problematic than that edifying episode from the history of wars whose first agent and ultimate culprit must have been, when all’s said and done and with no room for objections, the professional incompetence of the vanquished army’s farrier.

Of the book’s two epigraphs, one is invented and the other comes from “Tristram Shandy,” Laurence Sterne’s gabby proto-modernist masterpiece of self-inquisition, a work whose merry challenge to the conventions of the realistic novel has proved, after its initial London fame, more influential on the Continent than in England.

The traditional articulations of English fiction are dismissed in the very look of Saramago’s prose, presented in paragraphs many of which are pages long. Direct speech is not marked even by dashes, let alone quotation marks; the utterances of a dialogue run together with only commas to separate them, plus the capitals that begin a sentence—a manner perhaps less confusing in Portuguese than in English, where the frequent word “I,” following a comma, seems, falsely, to signal a different speaker. The reader must wonder what advantage of mimetic fidelity is gained in the author’s mind: the long, unpunctuated paragraphs of Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness at the end of “Ulysses” declare a fresh, all-embracing, female point of view; the Austrian Thomas Bernhard’s unrelieved blocks of type express his rageful contempt for the reader, Austria, and life in general. In Saramago’s case, his embedding the dialogue almost invisibly in the expository prose must indicate a sense of his characters’ speech merging with their thoughts and impressions, which in turn merge with the author’s flowing voice, as overbearing and possessive, in its way, as that of a moralizing Victorian.

“The Double” gathers in interest as the action moves from Tertuliano’s distress and bafflement at his own duplication to his intervention in the life of his double, the double’s retaliation, and the growing involvement of the two women, Maria da Paz and Helena. These women—like most of Saramago’s—are sensible, warm, and alert, and their presence provides a civilized context, an index of peaceful possibility, for what becomes, between the two identical-looking men, a savage and vengeful war tinged with an atavistic horror of identity theft and a belief in the triumphal content of seducing an enemy’s woman. What tragedy resides in the outcome resides in the ill-used women’s feelings; the men are less sympathetic. Tertuliano, that meek and lonely history teacher, is described at the beginning as suffering from depression; but, unlike Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” and Poe’s “William Wilson,” Saramago’s “Double” does not wrap the perception of a double in the protagonist’s delusional pathology or a suggestion of an inner self projected outward. The similarity objectively exists, down to the men’s moles and fingerprints, and has the comedy of, in Henri Bergson’s formulation, “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.” Cloning, one letter away from clowning, affords us a smile as well as a shudder. Tertuliano’s double, unlike William Wilson’s, is not a whispering voice of conscience; António Claro is a bit actor in movies turned into videos, a habitual seducer, a karate expert (he is stronger than Tertuliano, but not apparently more muscular), and a heel, who totes a gun—in short, a bad actor. The reader shares the hero’s desire that he be erased. The novel, with its farcical elements, does not quite deepen into the dizzying vortex of identity issues that may have been intended; it remains more comic than not, and lacks the unforced momentum and resonance of “Blindness,” which, like Camus’s “The Plague,” allegorizes societal breakdown and a basic fear. Most of us are afraid of going blind; being duplicated is a relatively minor worry.

Yet Saramago has a questing and well-stocked mind, amiably engaged in the patient investigation of human nature. To bulk out the lean diagrammatics of his plot, with its mere four principals, he ruminates on the vagaries of language and the difficulty of applying common sense to our actions. Both are aspects, perhaps, of the same problem, human irrationality. Human beings are too complex and conflicted for words; “All the dictionaries put together,” Maria da Paz tells Tertuliano, “don’t contain half the terms we would need in order for us to understand each other.” A lack of words at the right time entangles Tertuliano in problems. He is unable, out of shame or caution, to tell Maria da Paz of the existence of his double, and his wordlessly mailing a false beard to António Claro goads the other to plot revenge: “Good heavens, how ridiculous, where will it all end, cry those happy people who have never come face-to-face with a copy of themselves, who have never suffered the terrible affront of receiving in the post a false beard in a box without even a pleasant, good-humored note to soften the blow.” On the other hand, a letter to a film production company that Tertuliano forges in Maria da Paz’s name provides a fatal link of evidence. A conversation with his inquisitive, solicitous mother leads him to think:

Words can be the very devil, there we are thinking we allow out of our mouths only the words that suit us, and suddenly another word slips out, where it came from we don’t know, we didn’t ask for it to appear, and because of that word, which we often have difficulty remembering afterward, the whole conversation abruptly changes direction, and we find ourselves affirming what we denied before, or vice versa, what happened just now was a perfect example, I hadn’t intended speaking to my mother so soon about this whole mad story.

Common sense actually figures in this mad story as a character, a voice that pops up in Tertuliano’s head to complain about their relationship: “You and me, your common sense and you, we hardly ever meet to talk, only very occasionally, and, to be perfectly honest, it’s hardly ever been worthwhile.” The personification is less intrusive as the novel gathers steam, but near the end the author declares that “with a little common sense, the matter could have ended there,” and traces human problems to a verbal error:

The proof that the universe was not as well-thought-out as it should have been lies in the fact that the Creator ordered the star that illumines us to be called the sun. Had the king of the stars borne the name Common Sense, imagine how enlightened the human spirit would be now.

One wonders. “Common sense” in Portuguese is surprisingly similar to the English: comum senso or bom senso. Nevertheless, some spirit-altering connotations may be lost in translation. Is common sense really a cure-all? We are told of Tertuliano not only that he is depressed and bored but that, in his mother’s words, “there’s a part of you that has been asleep ever since you were born.” Embracing double trouble is perhaps his way of waking up; the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of. The stagnating heart welcomes an irruption, even a harsh and dangerous one; the appeal of unreason cannot be legislated out of Utopia. To enthrone common sense as the king of the stars could spell the end of priests, magicians, beauticians, advertising executives, and novelists. ♦

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